The DailyMed website is a valuable website when it comes to chemical names, trade names, drug names and chemical structures.What is interesting is the quality of the information on the website. We were originally interested in using the website to expand our dictionary of drug names and associated chemical structures and exercising our text-mining tools to recognize chemical structures. In order to test our text-mining capabilities we had to examine every record for accuracy and appropriateness and to tune the algorithms. This amounted to over 3000 records. During this process we were able to review every chemical structure diagram and the appropriateness of these diagrams. As part of the process we were able to build a highly validated dataset of chemical structures and their chemical/trade/drug names. These will be exposed on ChemSpider in the near future.

For now lets examine the quality of information on Daily Med.

The website is advertised as:

“DailyMed provides high quality information about marketed drugs. This information includes FDA approved labels (package inserts). This Web site provides health information providers and the public with a standard, comprehensive, up-to-date, look-up and download resource of medication content and labeling as found in medication package inserts. ”

So, what type of materials can we find on Daily Med?

Look at Soltamox here. What do you think about the chemical structure image below? Do you think that was drawn with a structure drawing software package?

My favorite “not drawn by a chemist” chemical structure is the one for cefobid shown below.

Many chemical structures on DailyMed are imperfect. What is quite shocking is that many of these are not even drawn with structure drawing packages. There are other issues…more to come.

COMMENT: DailyMed is a delivery vehicle for content provided by vendors (I believe). The site is a valuable public service and is applauded. The hope is the work that we are doing on Daily Med will be of similar value and might encourage that some of the labels will be “cleaned up”

Can we import the records to Chemspider, clean them up here, and then re-export them back to DailyMed (will they allow it)? That last one (cefobid) is particularly bad, I can barely tell that it is one structure.

The DailyMed is constrained to present only the material in the label section that has been approved by the FDA. The content of those labels is the FDA approved information about the products. The drawings, as part of that label, cannot be altered by the National Library of Medicine. I would suggest you contact the folks at the FDA, or even the manufacturer, about them submitting to FDA higher quality structural drawings.
Unfortunately, even if Chemspider cleaned up the drawings and sent them back to me, I could not put them into the label.

Stuart, Thanks for the comments. I understand the constraints. I’ve discussed with the FDA already. I have no idea who to talk to at the manufacturers and don’t have the time or resources to figure that out I’m afraid.

I was involved in the early research of Daily Med as an outside solutions vendor. The approach the FDA took to the adoption of Daily Med was one of Centralized Innovation Diffusion (Roger’s, 1995). In my humble opinion, what this has caused is mandated industry adoption but not integration into the various industry wide systems that could benefit from the collection of this information. Our Daily Med, ISBN: 978-3-8383-1035-0 is a book that describes the Daily Med Innovation adoption based upon Roger’s Diffusion of Innovation.